When you search Google on this topic you see many different approaches to this subject. The default
settings on /var/www/html in FC4, when installing from RPM, is root:root.
[me@comp ~]$ ls -l /var/www/html total 3344 drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 2 17:49 abj drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 8 17:18 chm drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 21 12:28 crypto drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 27 15:38 david_icke -rwxr--r-- 1 root root 44494 Oct 25 16:31 dh4.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 87 Nov 1 13:42 expmod.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 318 Oct 25 15:54 favicon.ico -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1787 Nov 14 13:12 fc4_audio.txt drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 27 16:32 fc4bench
What's surprising to me is that some claim that it's correct to set permissions as apache:apache. While this is the minority, it's a very uninformed minority. The only reason to change permissions here is to organize for group authorship of web pages and scripts. So for ease of flexibility, define a group for authors and allow the group to read, write, and execute here.
The following page discusses this nicely:
Rights to Update htdocs
I've seen many discussions about this here, with the wrong variety mixed in:
FC4 Lists